


Compass Points

by Maugris



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-03-29 21:21:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3911119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maugris/pseuds/Maugris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some time ago, a mouth in the floor opened up wide and swallowed their parents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Some time ago, a mouth in the floor opened up wide and swallowed their parents. It was like this: a loud sound, a shudder that sent the cheap chandeliers swinging, and then a yawning gap that swallowed furniture and rugs and lamps and also mother, also father. So hungry, Wanda thinks. Like Pietro has always been, like there is a hole in him that can never be filled. Eats like a horse, Mama always said.

The mouth in the floor is like that.

The two of them escaped the mouth, but there is danger here still. Even hidden in the dark under the bed with her brother, springs overhead and cracked linoleum under her cheek. Because not long after there was another crash, a great solid object heaving through the walls and the windows and coming to rest just feet from their heads, stuck halfway through Wanda's bedside table. She could almost reach out and touch it.

It is a second mouth, and it hasn't opened -- not yet. It waits for them to move. It waits to bare its teeth.

Sometimes things creak and settle down in the hole and distantly she can hear voices, sirens. But no one comes for them.

Pietro is curved around her front, his chin on her collarbone. His shoulders are taut and shivering and they have been that way for hours. He's made himself a shield for her, offering his back to the bomb. It's beautiful and pointless. They're young, sure, but Wanda knows a bit about war and a bit about death and she knows that her brother can't save her from this.

With his face in her hair, Pietro can't see the thing the way she can. Gunmetal grey and perfectly featureless but for the red lettering on the side. STARK INDUSTRIES, it says.

"Stark," she says.

"Quiet," Pietro says. "Be still."

"That's the name," she says. "That's the name of the thing that's killed us." 

The red letters fill her field of vision -- they become all that she can see. The soft tips of her brother's hair and the bold lines of their death waiting for them, tilted on the floor like a dropped toy. Wanda has been afraid, is afraid, is so full of fear that her lips and teeth are numb with it and somehow she's moved past it to a state of perfect, frozen calm.

"We're not dead yet," Pietro says fiercely, digging his fingertips into her upper arms. 

Wanda shakes her head, just once. She closes her eyes and listens to Pietro's heartbeat, too fast and too loud.

Twenty-two hours later, they are rescued. By this time, Wanda has spent so many hours in perfect, terrified stillness that she feels like a stone. Her arms don't want to untangle from Pietro's and her hip burns from the pressure of the floor. The man who saved them handles her like a doll, gently pulling her limbs into place.

"It'll be all right," he says.

She doesn't really believe him, but she says "Thank you," because it's what her mother taught her to do. She and Pietro don't cry -- after two days, maybe they don't have enough water left for tears. They sit side by side while people fuss all around them and their fingers touch and Wanda thinks about the mouth, that gaping mouth, and how hungry it had been. To swallow up their whole lives -- just like that.

\------

For a while they are made to live apart. Wanda goes to a narrow row house filled with other girls, and for the sixteen months she is there she learns all about fitting in. Her customs are different from theirs; the prayers she knows are different. So she learns to say none at all.

And sometimes she thinks she knows something about these girls -- knows instinctively which ones are kind and which ones are cruel, which are soft and which are broken. Is it something in their faces? Like the scar that runs across their house mother's mouth from cheek to chin. There's some record of these wounds, even if they are not always visible.

Wanda is broken, too, but only a little. She can hold it together. She can.

A girl named Anka sleeps in the bed next to hers and wakes one night from a vicious nightmare. She gasps and makes a small, strangled cry and Wanda reaches for her before she can think better of it. She touches Anka's elbow and says, "You're safe. The water is gone."

Anka shakes and cries a little more before she slips back to sleep. She is a year or so younger than Wanda, and very small. She sleeps quietly enough, after, though Wanda lies awake for a long time. She almost feels it, a bruisy tenderness in her shoulders -- the place where Anka's mother had gripped her daughter and held her under the water in the bathtub. 

There are no bruises on Wanda's shoulders. She clenches her teeth and works her fingernails into the meat of her palms. Her own mother had been so patient and kind -- had always praised Wanda's vivid imagination. Such a thinker! The things she came up with about other people -- surely she was meant to be a writer, someday.

"It's not real," she whispers to herself, and across the room someone hisses, "Shut up, we're trying to sleep."

In the daytime, they shuffle back and forth from school along a chunked-up roadway lined with tree stumps. The trees had been cut down years ago to make room for new electric wires, which run thick overhead like humming black arteries. 

From a window up high, an unseen television blares the news. Wanda tips her head to listen, pausing in her tracks.

"Outspoken local politician Artyom Matskevich passed away late last night," the newsman says. She can't see his face, but he has a very soothing voice.

Darja, one of the oldest girls in the row house, is paused beside her. She stares up at the window and her hands are in fists. Wanda thinks about saying: hey, look, the others are still going, we'll be late for school -- but she looks at Darja's face and she says nothing. They stand beneath the window and Wanda reads the graffiti on the walls. There's a small yellow scrawl that says _Radovan has dicks for teeth,_ accompanied by a detailed illustration.

"Matskevich became recently prominent on the national level due to his pro-separatist rhetoric and calls for investigation into government corruption, including allegations of illegal wiretapping and surveillance. On several occasions, he has accused the Sokovian government--"

"Did you know him?" Wanda says.

"Not really," Darja says. There's a bright sheen to her eyes but her voice is very steady.

The newsman says, "Matskevich passed away in his home, from what officials are calling natural causes."

"Bullshit!" says a voice from the window, and there's a sudden loud crash of glass breaking.

"Come on," Darja says, and she touches Wanda lightly on the shoulder. "We'll be late for school."

Darja walks very fast, and Wanda has to hurry to keep up. She looks back once -- at the open window, and the man shouting upstairs. Only one of the spraypainted messages on the wall is still legible at this distance -- it's done in red letters a meter in height, at least. In Roman letters, it says: PAX.

It's a nice dream, peace -- but she knows there are too many men in the business of war. Ticks growing fat on blood.

_Stark,_ she thinks, and wishes her brother was with her.

\------

The house mother is not a bad woman. She treats the girls fairly and feeds them enough and keeps the temperature of the row house just a hair short of comfortable. She doesn't go out much, but rather sits in the kitchen by the oven and reads books printed in Polish or French or Portuguese.

"It's important to speak with people in their own tongue, if you can," she tells Wanda. "They might still cheat you or treat you badly, but they won't mistake you for an animal."

"I've been learning English in school," Wanda says.

The house mother scoffs. "Of course you have," she says. "Learn it well, then -- who knows what language we'll be speaking in another twenty years."

She looks pointedly at the television beside the microwave, always left on a channel with international news and also quiz shows and nature documentaries dubbed over in Sokovian. Wanda's room is near the kitchen and sometimes she wakes at night hearing: _please answer in the form of a question -- the tiger is an apex predator -- the value of the yen is --_

The American president is onscreen just then, talking solemnly about the five-year anniversary of their great national tragedy. "We are fighting to maintain the way of life enjoyed by free nations," he says.

Wanda squints at the television, watching the faces of the men in the background. Some of them look enraptured, but most of them look bored. "America isn't interested in us, are they?"

"No," the house mother says. "Because we're not yet interesting."

Pounding footsteps make them both pause. One of the other girls runs down the hall past the kitchen, shrieking. "Anka! Give it back!" Her footsteps fade gradually, and a door down the hall open and then slams. A moment later, Anka rounds the corner on her tiptoes, holding a stuffed rabbit by the ears.

"Anka," the house mother says, low and exasperated.

"She deserves it." Anka scowls, her eyes red at the corners. "She was mean to me."

"Oh, well then," the house mother says. "You're right, stealing does make it all better."

Anka shrinks back against the wall while the house mother snorts a little puff of air through her nose and then laughs. She gets up, pushing her chair back so it squeals against the tiled floor.

"Come on, then," she says, steering Anka back out into the hall. And over her shoulder, to Wanda, she says: "We should take care to remain uninteresting, then, shouldn't we?"

\------

From the wall of a back alley at wintertime, Wanda sees a man on the street hit a boy across the face so hard it makes a noise like a shot. The boy staggers back and drops to his knees in the snow, blood dripping from his mouth. When he looks up at the man, lips twisted in a red sneer and bright fury in his eyes, she thinks: _Pietro._

She takes off running, shoes slipping on the slick street, cold air ripping through her lungs. But she's slow, she's small, she's never been the runner that her brother is. The man bends down and grips the boy's upper arm, yanking him to his feet. Wanda says something, the fragments of a name vanishing under the heave of her own breath. It's too strange, that she would find him here. Without even looking -- it had always seemed like something more difficult than that, some kind of quest to be embarked on. She would have to rescue him like some princess in a tower.

She tries again -- "Pietro," she shouts, pulling air from the bottom of her lungs. It's quiet and cold and her voice whips across the street like a lightning strike. The man turns to look at her and the boy turns away. He twists in the man's grip and kicks out with his feet, fierce and cat-silent.

"Fucking kids," the man says. When she reaches him, her teeth bared and her fingers crooked into claws, he swats her aside as easily as a barking dog, and with as little feeling.

Wanda stumbles and lands hard on her hip. Her chin hits the snow and under it the concrete and her teeth smash together and for a moment she sees only white. There's a low whine in her ears and a terrible tightness through her ribs. She can't breathe. She can't think. The man says something, but she can't hear it clearly. The boy says something back.

When she picks herself up to her knees, there's nothing left of them but footprints and a few drops of blood. Wanda hurts all over; she cries quietly and is only the colder for it.

The man is gone. And again, her brother is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

There's a man sitting at the kitchen table, watching a crime procedural on the television by the microwave. Wanda stands there in the doorway, staring at him. It's four-thirty in the morning and she's barefoot, wearing a nightdress with her heavy overcoat over the top because the row house is always a little cold. She'd only come in for a glass of water.

"Hey, little girl," the man says affably. "What are you doing up this time of day?"

"It's not day," Wanda says. "It's still dark out."

The man checks the window. "So it is."

She shifts and her bare feet squeak on the tile. "I just came to get some water."

"So get it," the man says, and turns his attention back to the television.

Wanda pulls down a glass from the cupboard and fills it at the tap. The water tastes sharp and mineral and cold. She watches the man at the table and tries to look like she isn't watching him. He's not a scary-looking man, not like the large man in the alley who hit Pietro across the face. This man is short and a bit fat and his face looks like it's accustomed to smiling.

Gunshots ring out on the television and the man winces. Wanda does, too. It's very late, and the other girls are sleeping. The gunshots on the TV sound fake, though, tinny and small. Last week one of their neighbors had fired a gun out the window -- he said it was to scare off pigeons, but that probably isn't true. Wanda can scare pigeons with her own two arms.

"You changed the channel," she says, after a time.

"Yeah," the man says. "So?"

"Nobody changes the channel. It's always playing news or quiz shows or something like that."

"I'm tired of the news," the man says. "Aren't you?"

"Yes," Wanda says. She is tired of it -- tired of all the shouting and the pain on people's faces and the flashes of Tony Stark, of bright American celebrities or Russian politicians wrestling bears. None of that has anything to do with her or her brother or their parents, crushed in a pile of rubble. There's nothing she can do about any of it.

"Sensible girl," the man says, and then he says, "Here, sit."

So Wanda sits at the table across from the man and they both sit sideways so they can see the TV. The characters on the show are familiar, like maybe it was something her parents used to watch, before. There's a brooding man and a beautiful woman and a funny, ugly sidekick. All in all, it's rather dull.

"That one is the murderer," the man says, as the brooding hero sits down to interrogate a thin man in a dark suit.

"How can you tell?"

"Because look at him. That cheap suit and that thin story," the man says. "You get a sense for these things, when you watch enough of them. They are very predictable."

Wanda twists her hands around her empty water glass. She counts the pits and scars in the tabletop and doesn't look at the man as she says, "I would like to catch murderers, someday."

The man says nothing. They watch the rest of the show in silence. At the end, the funny sidekick leads the suitcoat man away in cuffs while the beautiful woman stands in front of the victim's house with tears in her eyes. _How could someone do that to another person,_ she is saying. _I'll never understand it, however long I work this job._

"You were right," Wanda says.

"So I was," he agrees. "Go to bed, little girl."

"But--"

"Go to bed," the house mother says.

Wanda jumps and twists in her chair to see her house mother, standing in the dim light at the door to the kitchen. She has a threadbare robe wrapped around her and she is holding something dark and angular in her hands.

"God fucks your mother," the man says, startled, at about the same time Wanda realizes that the dark thing her house mother is carrying is a gun.

"Why are you in my home, Dragan." The house mother scans the kitchen and her eyes light on Wanda and the TV and back again to Wanda. She sighs and tucks the gun into the pocket of her robe.

"Things you should know," the man -- Dragan -- says. "What, you're not happy to see me?"

"Go to bed, Wanda," the house mother says.

The two of them stare at her and Dragan folds his hands in front of him. He is smiling and the house mother is not. Wanda gets to her feet and walks slowly from the kitchen into the hall, feeling their gaze on her back. She's not sure whether she's in trouble or not.

About fifteen feet from the door is a creaky floorboard. Wanda marches over to it, her footsteps carefully loud, and steps on it; the noise it makes is like a cat being strangled. But she doesn't continue down the hall to the room she shares with the other girls. She waits.

"We need your help," Dragan says. His voice carries easily into the hall.

"I don't have anything more to give you," the house mother says. She speaks more quietly, and Wanda has to lay her ear against the wall to hear her clearly.

Eavesdropping is rude, of course. Wanda's mother would be ashamed, to see her daughter with an ear pressed against the wall like a snooping neighbor -- but then, her mother isn't there to see it.

"We need money," Dragan says. "We need bodies. Not for nothing dangerous -- just hands that can start cars or cross wires. Delivery people. Assembly people."

The house mother laughs. "You'll combat Stark weapons with a few glass-bottle bombs? A few underground deals? Next you'll tell me that it's you going around painting pax all over the street."

Wanda flinches at the name _Stark,_ but only a little. She says it to herself, after all, often enough that it's started to sound like a sort of prayer.

"People have seen the man with the metal hand," Dragan says, and this comment is met with silence. Into the quiet, a television commercial speaks frankly about something called _erectile dysfunction._

"Where has he been seen?" the house mother says, after a time.

"Everywhere. Nowhere. Like they say, he is a ghost. A monster to scare your girls."

There's the scrape of a chair, then the faucet running. The sound of the house mother spitting into the sink. "You know he is not a ghost. Of all people, you should know."

"I know," Dragan says, very softly.

Wanda's heart hammers at her ribs. She's heard something important, somehow; she knows it's important even if she doesn't know how. The house mother creaks around on the kitchen tiles and Wanda steals back to her room, this time avoiding the loose floorboard. 

No one stirs in the room, because Wanda is good at being quiet when she needs to. She slips back into bed and lies there staring at the ceiling, watching pale light start to filter through coarse curtains and spread across the room. She doesn't fall back asleep, but holds her hand up and lets the morning sun splay silver over her skin. A metal hand, she thinks. How strange.

\------

"Tell me about your brother," Darja says. She is the oldest girl in the house now, after the start of the new year. Others have moved on, but Darja is still here. Something's wrong with her, though. She moves carefully, like her bones have turned brittle, and she keeps her arms hugged around her ribcage. The house mother speaks to her very gently, these days.

"Why?" Wanda says. She used to talk about Pietro, sometimes, but she doesn't anymore. Like her memories of him are finite, splintered things, and to speak of him would be to give them away and have nothing left for herself.

"You miss him so much," Darja says. "I can tell. I just thought he must be someone special, to have a person like you care so much."

"He's my only family."

She stops awkwardly, unwilling to go on. Darja knows about what happened to her parents, probably. All the girls talk. Everybody talks. They talk about Darja, too.

It's snowing outside. Great drifts of snow are piling in the streets, pushed against buildings and curbs by the the wind. The window-glass is almost too cold to touch, but Wanda lays a hand on it anyway. A couple of younger kids shriek from the street below, pelting each other with wads of hard-packed snow.

"I lost my family too," Darja says. She's turned a bit away from Wanda, looking away from the window into the darkness of the hallway. "My parents were walking home from dinner one night when some men pulled them into a car and shot them. They found their bodies in the river three days later."

"I'm sorry," Wanda says awkwardly.

"Nobody talks about it, but we've been at war for a long time, haven't we?" Darja says. She turns to face Wanda and smiles, for the first time in weeks. She's missing a tooth low in her mouth, an alarming dark gap in her familiar smile. "And wouldn't you do something about it, if you could?"

"What," Wanda starts to say, but then Darja moves forward and takes the hand that Wanda had splayed along the windowpane. Darja's fingers are so warm that Wanda's hand burns at the touch of them.

"You're too young for this," she says. "I'm sorry I asked."

Absurdly, Wanda's eyes prickle with tears. It's stupid, because what does she have to cry about? And what good does it do, anyway? Crying won't find her brother, won't bring back her parents or fix what is broken in Sokovia. So she won't do it anymore. She blinks and gulps breaths and settles her face. "I want to do something. I want to help." 

"Come find me in a few years," Darja says. "When you're older. I'll show you how you can help this country."

"I will," Wanda says, clamping her jaw and looking out over the grey-white-red streets of her city, the only one she's ever known. Darja's finger tighten and then let go, and she hears footsteps retreating quietly down the hall.

She isn't at all surprised when she wakes the next morning and finds that Darja, too, has gone.

\-----

By late spring, she is making plans to leave. This involves several uncertain logistical considerations -- will she be able to go to school, once she's left the house? how will she afford food and clothing? how will she find Pietro? -- but there's nothing in that place for her, not now. The house mother frets around, going paler by the day, her mouth pinched into a hard line -- she shoves money into envelopes and begins stockpiling canned food in little pyramids under the tip-legged kitchen table. Dragan comes by again, and this time he has no words for Wanda. Other men come by, too.

It's time for her to go.

"Why do you help them?" she asks the house mother one evening, after Dragan has been sent away with a notebook page full of scribbled names and an envelope of cash.

It's Wanda's turn to help with dinner, but dinner isn't much these days. She pours dehydrated potato flakes into a pot of boiling water and watches them swirl among the bubbles and start to gum up.

"Because they're my friends, and they've helped me before," the house mother says, and hesitates. "Because I believe that what they're doing is right."

"I thought we were supposed to stay uninteresting."

The house mother swivels to look at her, eyebrows raised in surprise. "You've a mind like a trap, girl," she says, which Wanda has heard before. "What do you think you know, now?"

It seems politic to say _nothing,_ so Wanda does, her voice light and innocent. She stirs the potatoes.

"Nothing," the house mother repeats.

"No," Wanda says. "I was just curious."

The house mother slaps a wooden spoon on the countertop and a man on the television says _Congratulations!_ quite loudly. Wanda startles and nearly scalds herself on the boiling water.

Stupid, she thinks -- she's going to need nerve for the times ahead. Stupid to be so jumpy here, when nothing has yet happened.

 _(It will, though,)_ sings that little inside part of her that knows, that always knows these things.

It's time to go.

"No good comes from being curious," the house mother says. "Ask me. I know."

They finish the dinner in quiet, and twenty minutes later Wanda ladles gooey potato paste and boiled-soft vegetables onto plates for the other girls. The house mother passes behind her and says, very softly, "Stay innocent while you can, girl. There's no need for you to know these things, not now. Please just grow up and then do good in this world, all right? Please."

She passes on without further pause, and doesn't mention it again. She smiles at Wanda over the dinner table and smacks Anka's hand when she reaches for something without asking.

It's a kind of home, this house. Not Wanda's home, never that -- the people are wrong, it's all wrong -- but it has been good to her. The house mother, the other girls, the creaking floorboards and narrow beds. It could have been her home, maybe, if she'd let it.

"Thank you," she says, and accepts a plate that's passed to her.

She packs her things in the night and leaves through the front door, closing it with the barest snick of a sound. The wind tugs at the hem of her thin coat, and it smells like sharp metal and cigarette smoke. She zips the coat to her chin and steps into the street, chasing after the lights of cars and the sound of distant voices. It's time for her to go. She is going to find Pietro.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! Real life and original fiction deadlines got in the way.
> 
> I'd originally meant to keep Wanda in the row house for another chapter, but then I thought you guys might find it dull so I moved things along. Pietro next chapter, I promise. And I have no idea what Bucky was canonically doing in this time period, but I also sort of don't care, so here he is! Well, sometime soon.
> 
> I'm going to try to stick to a stricter schedule for the next few chapters, so expect the next one within two weeks. Hopefully.


End file.
